But he had.
Her phone. That had probably been Gussie, cancelling the party. She’d check the message and then go and talk with Will. They’d make up. It would be all right.
Wind was hammering at the windows, shaking the panes. Somewhere a shutter had come loose and was hitting the side of the house. The banging felt as though it was inside her head.
Maggie looked for her bag, where her phone was. She found it under the wet clothes she’d hurriedly peeled off. Before the outline of her world changed.
Her phone was in the bottom of the canvas bag she used as a pocketbook. The bag was still damp; she should have emptied it and put it near the radiator. Too late for that now.
The message wasn’t from Gussie; it was from Annie. Because of the storm, the party’d been moved to an earlier time. Lily’d decided not to go, because of the storm, but Annie would pick Maggie up at five-thirty at Six Gables.
Five-thirty! She only had fifteen minutes to get ready. And no time to talk with Will; no cozy dinner here at the inn. If she weren’t the maid of honor, she’d be tempted to opt out, as Lily had. But she didn’t have a choice.
Somehow through her emotional fog she found clean, dry underwear, a pair of decent slacks, and a dry sweater. The sweater wasn’t as nice as the one she’d had on earlier, but that one wouldn’t be dry for hours. In this weather she couldn’t be expected to be elegant. She looked at the leather shoes she’d planned to wear, and then at her soaked sneakers. Neither was a good choice. She opted for the wet sneakers and a pair of dry socks. Her feet wouldn’t stay dry long anyway. Why ruin a good pair of shoes?
She made an attempt at braiding her still-damp hair, which no doubt would get soaked again, and added a minimum of makeup, hoping it wouldn’t run. She didn’t really care what she looked like anyway.
In case she didn’t see him downstairs, in case he cared, she left Will a note. Time of bachelorette party moved up. Getting ride with Annie. Back as early as possible. She hesitated before signing it, Love, Maggie. She did love him, damn it. She left the note on the bed.
As soon as she got downstairs, Annie pulled up in front of Six Gables, although not in the police car she’d promised earlier. Probably the chief had other plans for the patrol cars tonight, Maggie thought as she climbed into the passenger seat. “How are the roads?” she asked, as they took off.
Tonight was a night to think about Gussie; not about Will.
The rains were still torrential.
“Not good,” Annie admitted. “A half dozen streets have already been blocked off because of flooding, and I had to detour around another because a tree had fallen. Luckily, it hadn’t hit a house, just another tree and a mailbox. I called the station to let them know so they could put roadblocks up there, too. It’s going to be a long night.”
“I’m surprised Sheila and Gussie didn’t cancel the party,” Maggie said. “It’s ridiculous to ask anyone to come out in this weather. It must have been a challenge for you to find a baby-sitter tonight.”
“Luckily there are a lot of teenagers in the neighborhood,” Annie said. “I can usually find someone willing to earn some money.” She swerved, barely missing a large branch blocking one lane.
The only lights were from swaying streetlights that gave a ghostly appearance to the wildly blowing tree tops and the garish reflections of the car’s headlights on the wet road.
Maggie looked around. “How far is the Snow Squall Inn? I thought Gussie said it was close to town. We passed downtown a while back.”
“I told you some streets were blocked,” Annie assured her, wiping the inside of the windshield so she could see more clearly. “I’m going around that area.”
Maggie nodded. But she had a growing sense that something was wrong. Even with weather this bad, from what Gussie’d said they should have been to the inn by now. But she didn’t know the area, and it was dark, and with the storm making it even harder to see than it would have been usually, she couldn’t be sure.
Where would Annie be taking her if not to the Snow Squall for the party?
Annie was the wife of the chief of police.
She’d also been Dan Jeffrey’s lover. Diana had caught her searching for something in Dan’s room. Had she really been looking for love letters?
What if she’d been one of Cordelia’s drug customers? Annie was the wife of a busy man. She had two small children, an immaculate house, and still found time to cook almost everything from scratch, and have time-consuming hobbies. Maybe she was one of those housewives who needed a little chemical help to get her through her day.
And Tony Silva, the awkward boy who didn’t have close friends, whose dad was pushing him to excel at a sport he was failing at, baby-sat for her.
Maggie’s mind raced, as Annie’s car skidded around another corner. Annie was driving faster now, focused on the road ahead of her.
They were heading further away from downtown Winslow on roads Maggie was pretty sure she’d never seen. Or maybe it was seeing them through a canopy of wavering tree limbs and drenching rain that gave every twist and turn in the road an eerie feeling, as though whatever was ahead was unknown, and unpredictable.
Maggie tried not to focus on the road, but on what she knew about Annie Irons.
Was it possible Tony Silva hadn’t bought the OxyContin pills he’d taken? Could he have found them at Annie’s house when he’d been baby-sitting? He’d had serious asthma. His father had said that, and so had Sean and Josh. OxyContin was a depressant. It would have slowed Tony’s breathing down faster than it would have in someone without breathing problems. Slowed his breathing down enough to stop it.
And Ike Irons hadn’t found the person who’d sold the pills to Tony last spring. Could that be because no one had sold them to Tony? Because Tony’d gotten them from Ike’s wife?
How many teenagers died or overdosed from prescription medications in their parents’ or grandparents’ medicine cabinets, or those in the homes of their friends?
Too many, Maggie knew.
Sean and Josh had told her where kids could get drugs. They didn’t say they knew for sure where Tony had.
On the campus where she worked students bought and sold their own prescription medications, especially those for anxiety or ADD. Sales like that were almost impossible to control.
Annie’s knuckles on the steering wheel had looked white in the glare of the occasional streetlight. But now there were few streetlights, and no lights from houses on Annie’s side of the car. Unless this area had lost power, they must be on the beach road. On a clear night you’d be able to see stars, and the moon, and lights from boats on Cape Cod Bay.
But tonight all boats had been brought in to dry dock, and the sky was low and dark. The tide would be high about midnight, Maggie remembered. That’s when houses near the Bay would be in most danger from a storm surge.
“Where are we going, Annie?”
“To the party, of course.”
“We left town behind a while ago,” Maggie said.
“I want to show you something,” said Annie.
The car sped through the narrow streets. Annie might know where they were going, but Maggie had no idea. She reached for her telephone.
It wasn’t in the outside pocket of her bag, where she always kept it. Damn. She must have left it on the bedside table at Six Gables.
She felt for it again, to be sure. It definitely wasn’t there.
But even if she had it, who would she call?
What would she say?
That she didn’t know where she was? That she was out for a drive with Annie Irons?
Even if Tony Silva had gotten OxyContin from Annie’s home, Maggie had no proof, and there was nothing to be done about it now. And if he’d taken it from her medicine cabinet, he’d stolen it, and she’d been guilty of nothing but trusting a baby-sitter not to invade her privacy or steal from her.
Maggie clutched the sides of her seat. Now Annie was driving through sections of flooded street. How deep was the water? The headlights reflected back rain pounding on water, not pavement.